PhaseOne IQ250 does Christmas @ Rock Center (with Sample Files)

PublishedDecember 24, 2014

Crop – Digital Perspective Correction

Schneider-Kreuznach 28mm f/4.5 LS @ 1/100s – f/4.5 – ISO 1600

To all of those out there celebrating, Merry Christmas!

Before starting this article I should note, for some reason the uploaded pictures didn’t show so you can view them on flickr here. So please download the full-resolution sample files (See below) before jumping to any conclusions or thinking I’m out of my f-ing mind with what I’m saying.

I was lucky enough to be able to be on the ice for the 2014 Rockefeller Christmas Tree lighting, but even more excitingly, my good friend Lance Schad from Digital Transitions was nice enough to lend me the very special PhaseOne IQ250, and a Schneider-Krueznach 28mm f/4.5 LS for the event which meant I was able to get some hands on real world experience with this digital back, and the results absolutely blew me away. For the purposes of this particular article, I’m not going to get terribly involved in reviewing this camera. Basically, all you need to know that this is a killer crop 50mp Sony CMOS sensor housed within PhaseOne’s IQ2 series digital back housing meaning that you get everything that you love about your IQ series digital back, with the wonders of a medium format digital CMOS sensor. The results are absolutely stunning.

As you will see the results from this camera are absolutely insane. ISO 800, ISO 1600, ISO 3200 are all highly usable, and even the results at ISO 6400 are amazingly usable as well (albeit with some qualifications). The absolutely amazing thing about the results out of this camera AT ALL ISO’s is that there are is almost no color noise. At ISO 3200 and ISO 6400 is there noise? Of course, but because it is not color noise it is shockingly inoffensive. There is some loss of sharpness / smudging of details which is only apparent when zoomed in at ISO 3200, and even at ISO 6400 zoomed out fully you would be hard pressed to notice it.

While there are a number of cameras out there now with the Sony crop censored 50mp CMOS medium format chip, I believe that the image processing skills of PhaseOne really shine through here. FULL-DISCLOSURE: I have not been able to review sample images from the Hasselblad H5D-50c or CFV-50c, or the Pentax 645z or other PhaseOne owned variants of this camera. However that being said, I believe if compared to the competition with the same sensor the PhaseOne IQ250 would wildly out class them because of Phase’s image processing abilities.

A Few of the sample images might suffer from a little bit of camera shake, because well, I was hand holding at relatively slow shutter-speeds…and it was cold out….and I may have had a little to drink…..so give me a break. But the point remains that these images are exceedingly clean, especially from a technical perspective. Below I will show some sample images as well as a couple of ISO series. But….

To all a happy holiday and a happy new year, thank you for making this year so great for my website. I know I am behind on posting a number of articles, but look at it this way, you have some fun stuff coming your way in January!